A Remembrance of Edward Hirsch Levi

Edward Hirsch Levi, President of the Academy, 1986-1989

by Jaroslav Pelikan
President of the Academy, 1994-1997

When I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1953, one of the first colleagues I came to know beyond the confines of Swift Hall and Harper Memorial Library was Edward Hirsch Levi. Forty years later, in 1993, when I was asked to consider becoming president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Edward Levi was one of the first colleagues whose advice I sought about a variety of questions, but especially about whether it was possible for someone to carry that position without being a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts. (He said, and he had proved, that it was possible.)

The reason behind both of these associations of mine with him, and the many others in between, was his lifelong recognition that our systems of organizing research and teaching on the basis of schools and departments can often be a hindrance rather than a help in "the growth of knowledge and the enrichment of life" (to quote the seal of the University of Chicago). At each stage of his remarkable academic career—as professor of law, dean of the law school, provost, and president (all of these at the place that he and I both referred to simply as "the University"), and then as president of the Academy—Edward Levi both exemplified in himself and encouraged in others a life of study that pushed the boundaries of existing schools and departments as far as they would permit and then went past the boundaries. Schools that served the three traditional so-called learned professions of "jurisprudence, medicine, and, alas, theology" (as Goethe has Faust list them) have been notorious for their isolationism—in earlier American history as freestanding institutions, but also more recently as professional schools at, but not automatically of, the university. Levi disposed of this isolationism in one devastating sentence: "The professional school which sets its course by the current practice of the profession is, in an important sense, a failure."

Two of the disciplines with which he sought collaboration for teachers and students of the law were economics and the humanities. The slogan of "law and economics" (frequently pronounced as a single word by slurring the "and" into an "n") could be the brilliant reality it has become partly because of the "fortuitous concourse" (in Lucretius's phrase) of the two at Chicago. My late father was a close friend of Professor (later Senator) Paul H. Douglas, and while I was a professor at Chicago I had the great good fortune of being a neighbor in the Michigan Dunes to Frank H. Knight. Through these two veterans of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago I was introduced to the ethos of that remarkable seedbed of Nobel laureates, and since then (also through the Academy) I have seen how "law'n'economics" has shaped a generation both of scholars and of jurists. Edward Levi's famous rule at the dinner parties that he and his wife, Kate, would host was "One conversation at a time, please!" The same rule applied to the conversations between economists and legal scholars.

At a university shaped by such towering figures as Robert Maynard Hutchins, himself a former law school dean at Yale, and Richard P. McKeon, it was impossible to escape the challenge of the ideas raised by the humanities and philosophy. With his own early interest in the study of English literature, Edward Levi made that challenge an integral part of his intellectual and scholarly life. The most abiding embodiment of this interdisciplinary commitment was his little book, now fifty years old, Introduction to Legal Reasoning. His deep roots in the twin origins of the Western tradition of "legal reasoning," the Hebraic and the Hellenic, enabled him in this provocative and deceptively modest exposition to probe the relation between inductive and deductive thought in formulating legal judgments. So successfully did he exploit the humanistic and philosophical heritage that in my graduate courses on the historiography of ideas I used to assign Introduction to Legal Reasoning as a guide on how to analyze texts, move from them to general principles, and apply these to questions that the texts had not anticipated.

All of this made Edward Levi a superb president of the Academy: an outstanding scholar in his own discipline who delighted in exchanges with outstanding scholars in many other disciplines. But in addition to his broad experience as a university citizen, he brought to the presidency of the Academy the special benefits of his public service; for in the valley of the shadow after Watergate, he had accepted appointment as attorney general of the United States. I shall leave to others the assessment of his contribution to our national life, which seemed to me to have, at least for a short while, redefined the job of attorney general, so often used for a reward to campaign managers or cronies, into a position of intellectual leadership and moral integrity. What this phase of his career meant for the Academy under his leadership was the restoration of its historic mission as a meeting ground between scholars of various disciplines and leaders of public life in the professions, business, and government. Over the years, the Academy has followed his lead in giving special attention to these areas and is about to establish, on vote of the Fellows, an entirely new class of the Academy—Public Affairs, Business, and Administration—analogous to the four classes in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities that have existed for so long.

The most ambitious project ever undertaken by the Academy in its entire history was the interdisciplinary and international examination of fundamentalism as a religious, social, political, and psychological phenomenon, which was made possible when Edward Levi convinced the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of the importance of supporting an Academy program in public policy that would "focus on topics where an understanding of the issues would be significantly increased by bringing together members of a variety of disciplines—a subject that would emphasize conditions in foreign countries that have consequences for the United States." In its six years of operation, the project hosted ten international conferences and six regional seminars, engaging over 150 scholars, journalists, and policy analysts from twenty countries. The Fundamentalism Project produced a five-volume set of studies, which provoked wide discussion, redefined the issues, and remains the standard reference work on the subject.

Edward Levi was not an easy person to learn to know. Superficial people found him intimidating, even rationalistic and "cold." He could become impatient with small talk, and he did not suffer fools gladly. But to those who did learn to know him, he was unfailingly generous and thoughtful. He encouraged his colleagues in the University and in the Academy to carry on their private education in public, and I never came away from a conversation with him without having been forced to think and rethink my presuppositions. I would often quote to myself the words of the Book of Proverbs (12:1), "Whoso loveth instruction loveth knowledge." And now I would add (10:7): "The memory of the just is blessed."